For Ittai Orr, the history of intelligence is not a story of steady scientific progress, but of roads not taken. An assistant professor of English and a scholar of early American literature and disability studies, Orr studies how people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries understood minds that did not conform—long before concepts like IQ narrowed those possibilities into a single scale. His current book project, Before IQ, excavates a lost archive of cognitive diversity, drawing from African American and Native American literature, transcendentalist writing, and other unorthodox sources to recover ways of thinking that modern measurement displaced.
At the center of Orr’s work is a simple but destabilizing question: what did people believe intelligence was for? “People observed differences in ability,” he explains, “but that didn’t have to lead to hierarchy.” In the early United States, before intelligence testing hardened into a tool of exclusion, writers, activists, and thinkers debated whether mental difference should limit citizenship, dignity, or participation in public life. Orr’s research reveals not consensus, but contestation—a “field of disagreement,” particularly among those most harmed by emerging standards of intelligence. African Americans, for example, were routinely told they had to prove intellectual capacity in order to deserve rights. Many responded by rejecting the premise altogether, challenging not just their ranking, but the measuring stick itself.
Orr’s archive is deliberately eclectic. Alongside scientific and medical texts, he reads canonical works like Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and the writings of Margaret Fuller with new eyes. Fuller’s 1843 travel narrative, Summer on the Lakes, long dismissed as strange or unreadable, becomes in Orr’s account a meditation on neurodiversity. Fuller interrupts her Midwestern journey with reflections on eccentric women from her childhood—figures who appear nowhere in the landscape she describes, yet linger insistently in her memory. “Why are these people here?” Orr asks. “What work are they doing in the text?” His answer reframes transcendentalism itself as a site where alternative models of mind—sleepwalking, spiritual vision, eccentric cognition—were taken seriously rather than pathologized.
That attentiveness to what later categories erased runs through Before IQ. The term “disability,” Orr notes, did not circulate in anything like its modern sense until the mid-nineteenth century. Conditions we might now label autism or intellectual disability were once described as eccentricity, clairvoyance, somnambulism, or spirituality—states that could inspire art rather than dismissal. The result, he suggests, was a cultural moment that allowed for “amazing poetry and art” precisely because difference was not yet fully medicalized. William Blake’s visions, for example, were not immediately reduced to delusion. They were part of a broader effort to understand what the human mind might be capable of.
Orr’s path to this work began not in the archive, but in activism. Before turning to early American literature, he worked to document resistance to sheltered workshops—workplaces where people with disabilities are legally paid below minimum wage under provisions dating back to the 1930s. Watching adults with disabilities funneled into jobs with no room for growth forced Orr to ask deeper historical questions. Why was it acceptable to link worth, wages, and quality of life so tightly to ability? Tracing those assumptions backward led him to the decades surrounding the American Revolution, when ideas about productivity, citizenship, and human value first crystallized into durable hierarchies.
That investigation pushed Orr across disciplinary boundaries. What began as a project rooted in disability studies expanded to include African American studies and Native American literature, each offering distinct challenges to ableist thought. Indigenous texts, in particular, demanded careful attention to translation and editing. Orr points to nineteenth-century publications by Henry Schoolcraft, who quietly removed praise for the intelligence of Manabojo, the Ojibwe trickster, from translated manuscripts. The omission, Orr argues, obscures a powerful critique: that even the most intelligent figures can be foolish, and that pride in intellect is itself suspect. Such moments reveal how editorial decisions shaped what later readers understood as intelligence—and what they were never allowed to see.
Teaching is where Orr brings these insights into conversation with the present. Across his courses, he emphasizes contingency: the idea that racism, ableism, and other hierarchies were constructed, not inevitable. “If the past is contingent,” he tells students, “the future is too.” By placing Anglo-American texts alongside Indigenous and African American perspectives, Orr encourages students to see how different worlds of value coexisted—and how easily things might have turned out otherwise. The goal is not only historical understanding, but ethical imagination: learning to hesitate before judgment, and to ask what kinds of minds our institutions reward or exclude.
That concern shapes Orr’s thinking about contemporary debates as well, including the role of artificial intelligence in the classroom. Skeptical of defining intelligence as predictive pattern-making, he argues that such models miss what he values most about human thought: creativity, judgment, and voice. Writing, for Orr, is not merely a means of assessment but a way of thinking. “Writing skills equal thinking skills,” he insists, and the joy of finding the right word—of letting language lead—is something he fears students might lose if they outsource too much of the process.
As a reader, Orr finds resonance across time and genre. He returns often to George Eliot, whose novels probe the boundaries between reason, faith, and madness, and whose characters ask how we should respond to ways of knowing we do not fully understand. Contemporary works like Richard Powers’s The Overstory similarly challenge rigid definitions of the human, inviting readers to imagine intelligence as relational, ecological, and community-minded. That vision echoes Indigenous theories of cognition Orr studies, where the “good mind” is not the fastest or most abstract, but the one that contributes most to collective life.
Looking ahead, Orr is cautiously hopeful about the future of disability and neurodiversity studies. He sees the field moving toward a more global and comparativist frame, with scholars tracing how ableism traveled through colonial systems to justify dispossession and exclusion worldwide. At the same time, he acknowledges unresolved tensions—between inclusion and rigor, between accessibility and competition—that universities continue to struggle to reconcile. Those paradoxes, he suggests, are not flaws to be smoothed over, but questions worth sitting with.
Before IQ does not offer a single alternative definition of intelligence. Instead, it recovers a crowded, unsettled past in which many definitions coexisted—and collided. By listening closely to those earlier debates, Orr invites readers to reconsider what they value in minds, and what kinds of futures become possible when intelligence is no longer a gatekeeping device, but a shared, human resource.
Ittai Orr is an Assistant Professor of English whose work bridges early American literature, disability studies, and Indigenous studies.
Paige Cook is a 2025-26 Public Humanities Intern at the Institute for the Humanities in her fourth-year, majoring in History and American Culture, with a minor in Environment.
